I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty: La articulación del trauma postcolonial en On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous de Ocean Vuong's On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous

Facultad de Filología GRADO EN ESTUDIOS INGLESES TRABAJO DE FIN DE GRADO CURSO: 2023/2024 Título: “I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty”: The Articulation of Post-Colonial Trauma in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Alumno: Daniel Alcobendas Quintana Firmado: Tutor: Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo 1 “I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty”: The Articulation of Post-Colonial Trauma in Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Table of Contents 1. Introduction .......................................................................................................................... 2 2. In the crossroads of trauma, language, and imperialism ................................................. 3 3. Analysis of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous ..................................................................... 8 3.1. English and Vietnamese: (M)Other tongue and orphan tongue ............................... 9 3.2. Memory and trauma ................................................................................................... 13 3.3. The rhetoric of healing ................................................................................................ 16 4. Conclusions ......................................................................................................................... 21 5. Works cited ......................................................................................................................... 24 2 1. Introduction Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name Mother of Exiles. —Emma Lazarus, “The New Colossus” Throughout the 20th century, many were displaced from their homelands because of imperialistic wars where the United States of America played a fundamental role. The best example of the imperialistic practices of the US is found in the Vietnam War, an event that has been marked in public consciousness as the most ashaming defeat in US history. Usually, most media —be it books, films or TV shows— where the Vietnam War is a central issue is told from the American perspective, mostly dealing with the struggles and hardships American soldiers went through in Vietnamese soil and the traumatic scars the war has left on them. Nonetheless, the effects of the war in the Vietnamese population are never shown, hence, it is important to address what happened with the Vietnamese people after the war. These products are usually male centred narratives told from the perspective of male combatants and veterans, and often emphasize values such as patriotism and heroism. Not only that, but the attitude of the American soldiers in most media set during the Vietnam War is condescending and patronizing, picturing themselves as saviours. Hence, the fact that new media where female and queer bodies are the centre of the narrative —as in the case that will be analysed in this dissertation— is a detail worth to consider in how the perception of this event is changing throughout time. After the Vietnam War ended in 1975, the number of Vietnamese refugees in the US rose to 130.000 due to an ambitious program carried out by the government (Yamane 2). The Vietnamese population grew to a point that it constituted itself as the fourth largest Asian American ethnic group (3). Regarding the situation of Vietnamese refugees after the Vietnam War, Ocean Vuong has been one of the latest and most renowned authors to deal with this topic. Vuong’s work is plagued with references to the war, to his family suffering the endless violence that came with it, and to the trauma of reviving those moments. What is more surprising about his work is that Vuong was born 13 years after the war ended. Consequently, it is worth to ask how the war has been so permeable in his poetry and fiction. 3 This dissertation aims to study how Vuong’s semi-biographical novel On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (2019) deals with trauma, memory and violence through a close analysis of how language articulates the process of generational trauma. A mixed perspective of postcolonial approaches to language and trauma studies will be employed in hope of providing a detailed examination. 2. In the crossroads of trauma, language, and imperialism In the case of Vuong’s novel, —and, thus, the Vietnamese case— the events of the Vietnam War, although not complying with a textbook definition of colonialism, and the American intervention in the conflict are undeniably motivated by imperialistic reasons. In the context of the Cold War and the decolonization of Africa and Asia, it is unthinkable for the United States to recur to the same colonial politics that were practised during the 19th century. These new colonial tactics focus on the integration of previously colonised countries to the Western world to prevent the influence of the Soviet Union in these countries: Success depended on the development of economic interdependence between Southeast Asia as a supplier of raw materials and Japan, Western Europe, and India as suppliers of finished goods. Although only of "secondary strategic importance" by itself, Southeast Asia nevertheless represented "a vital segment on the line of containment." "If SEA is held," Kennan explained, "the links will exist for the development of an interdependent and integrated counterforce to Stalinism in this quarter of the world." He stressed the need for an American policy designed "to contain and steadily reduce Kremlin influence," thereby allowing the region "to develop in harmony with the Atlantic community. (Hixson 151) Knowing the reasons for the American intervention in Vietnam, it is reasonable to acknowledge Vuong’s novel as a post-colonial work, an attempt to narrate the trauma created by colonial practices in his community, and mainly, in his family. In Cathy Caruth’s words, trauma is “an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena.” (11) Trauma studies scholars such as Caruth have tried to provide an analytical framework to explain the difficulties of narrating traumatic experiences. For Caruth, “[t]hrough the notion of trauma, I will argue, we can understand that a rethinking of reference is aimed not at eliminating history but at 4 resituating it in our understanding, that is, at precisely permitting history to arise where immediate understanding may not.” (11) Trauma can only be comprehensible through the rhetorical tools found in narrative. Therefore, the need to process and understand trauma awakens a literary sensibility, and it is in this necessity to tell that trauma studies emphasize its study of the creative process. Nevertheless, Caruth and other trauma scholars have been rightfully criticised for their Eurocentric biases and for the lack of attention paid to non-Western realities, which is even more aggravating when considering that “trauma theory confidently announced itself as an essential apparatus for understanding ‘the real world’ and even as a potential means for changing it for the better.” (Craps 45) Stef Craps signals three main mistakes in trauma scholarship: [T]hey marginalize or ignore traumatic experiences of non-Western or minority cultures; they tend to take for granted the universal validity of definitions of trauma and recovery that have developed out of the history of Western modernity; and they often favour or even prescribe a modernist aesthetic of fragmentation and aporia as uniquely suited to the task of bearing witness to trauma. (46) From this brief account of the problems which trauma theory presents we can develop a more complex framework in which factors such as imperialism will not be left unaddressed, but, on the contrary, they will play a key role in understanding how trauma emerges and behaves in post-colonial settings. When talking about trauma, it is crucial to focus on the material conditions that surround the traumatised individual and recognize that this individual trauma may have also affected the whole group to which this individual belongs. For example, imperialism has not only had economic and political consequences, but it has also supposed a collective trauma for the colonised people. Frantz Fanon paid special attention to the psychological outcomes of colonisation. For him, the core of the problem is the inferiority complex that colonialism has caused on colonised population: “However painful it may be for me to accept this conclusion, I am obliged to state it: For the black man there is only one destiny. And it is white.” (12) Fanon exemplifies the importance of thinking about trauma as a product of dynamics of oppression. Post-colonial approaches to language and the difficulties of narrating the experience of being colonised in the language of the Empire become a great complement for the analysis of articulating trauma in post-colonial contexts. This multi-modal approach to the experiences of 5 traumatised collectives provides a new layer of deepness and place the cause of trauma as the result of the dynamics of imperialism in the colonised population. Scholars such as Irene Visser defends the need for a more complete approach to trauma: “As a very complex phenomenon, trauma defies the construction of a single theoretical framework to address and interpret its multifarious complexities in postcolonial literary studies.” (111) In his famous essay Decolonising the Mind (1986), Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o expresses how “[c]ulture is almost indistinguishable froth the language that makes possible its genesis growth banking, articulation and indeed its transmission from one generation to the next.” (15) Therefore, the final goal of imperialism is “[t]o control a people's culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others.” (16) Wa Thiong’o’s stance on language is well known, most of his work is written in Kikuyu because he does not believe that English is an appropriate language to represent African struggles. However, his thoughts on language and culture entangle in a more complex context when we look at first and second-generation immigrants. I believe that in immigrant postcolonial literature the English language is an obstacle, but one that is inescapable and must be critically dealt with and used as a vehicle for subversion. The language of the Empire is present in the life of immigrants who move to the metropolis, for whom that language is something that must be confronted as their lives develop in it and it permeates their worldview. Consequently, I would argue that even though English presents problems in the articulation of trauma, as the violence exerted by the language itself contributes to fueling the alienation of the individual, I observe a kind of “shock therapy” in Vuong’s work when dealing and narrating trauma in English, as the language —and, for wa Thiong’o, culture— of the Empire is a reality that must be tamed and subjugated to the necessities of colonized population because “[t]he crucial function of language as a medium of power demands that post-colonial writing defines itself by seizing the language of the centre and re-placing it in a discourse fully adapted to the colonized place.” (Ashcroft et al. 37) To achieve a better understanding of how his Vietnamese heritage affects his present work and life in the USA and how English becomes an imperative in his writing, the concept “Third Space”, enunciated by Homi K. Bhabha, provides a great insight in how post-colonial identities are developed. Bhabha defined the Third Space as the place “which gives rise to something different, something new and unrecognizable, a new area of negotiation of meaning and representation.” (Rutherford 211) 6 The Third Space takes from the culture of the country of origin and the country of destination. This hybridity breaks the binary Self-Other constructed in Western thought, and creates a dimension where the struggles and trauma of colonised populations can be narrated and dealt with: It is that Third Space, though unrepresentable in itself, which constitutes the discursive conditions of enunciation that ensure that the meaning and symbols of culture have no primordial unity or fixity; that even the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew … Such an intervention quite properly challenges our sense of the historical identity of culture as a homogenizing, unifying force, authenticated by the originary Past, kept alive in the national tradition of the People. In other words, the disruptive temporality of enunciation displaces the narrative of the Western nation. (Bhabha 208) Through this hybrid identity a much more complete view of the situation is portrayed, the postcolonial work is placed in a fluid and ever-changing place of contact between cultures that takes into account the several different conditions that converge to develop the individual and the community. It is in this “contact zone” where we can understand colonial dynamics “not in terms of separateness, but in terms of co-presence, interaction, interlocking understandings and practices, and often within radically asymmetrical relations of power.” (Pratt 8) Regarding this contact zone to which Mary Louise Pratt refers, she makes an interesting analysis of the enclaves of migrant communities in the metropolis. For Pratt, this phenomenon “implies dual citizenship, both literally, and, in an existential sense, of a kind of doubling of the self into parallel identities in one place and the other, one language and another. This can be both a fragmenting and empowering experience.” (242) The contradictory experience of this occurrence is reflected in my stance, previously mentioned, of the imperial language as violent but subversive. Bhabha’s Third Space and Pratt’s contact zone provide us with the site in which the colony and the Empire collide and birth the post-colonial experience. The literature born out of this expression mirrors the asymmetrical power dynamics of the colony and the Empire and how these communities experience “their citizenship in a form of an often permanent ‘awayness’.” (Pratt 242) Obviously, we cannot assume that a sense of ‘equalness’ derives from these loci, under Western ideological apparatuses these people are still othered. 7 Additionally, in this analysis of the origins of trauma it is imperative to focus on the history of these populations and how trauma is transmitted from one generation to the next. On this matter, the concept of “postmemory”, enunciated by Marianne Hirsch provides a great insight in this process: Postmemory describes the relationship that the “generation after” bears to the personal, collective, and cultural trauma or transformation of those who came before –to events that they “remember” only by means of the stories, images and behaviors among which they grew up–. But these events were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall, but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. (172) Trauma becomes a burden that permeates a whole community for generations, so the new generation carries the experiences and lives of its ancestors and are not able to escape the colonial dynamics of centre-margins established by imperial states in the past. Consequently, they need to deal with a double trauma, the past and the current. In this context, narration emerges as the only possible way where it is conceivable that “amid the aesthetics of loss and mourning, to make space for memories of resistance and the anticipation of change –to mobilize memory and postmemory oriented not only to the past, but also toward a more hopeful future.” (Hirsch 175) Thus, fiction acts as a tool for political resistance, it faces the narrative of the Empire and “[i]t makes space for alternative potential histories, enjoining us to imagine what might have been, in addition to what was. It attempts to circumvent linear trajectories leading, inevitably, to disaster.” (175) Narration allows the colonised population to break with what it is imposed to them, to find a new identity in the post-colonial setting. Furthermore, postmemory fiction acknowledges the text as a locus of in-betweenness of the precolonial and the postcolonial —the already mentioned Third Space— and it is in this space that emancipatory linguistic strategies occur. I align with Fanon’s assertions that “[e]very colonized people —in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality— finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation; that is, with the culture of the mother country.” (18) Because this abrupt and asymmetric encounter of 8 cultures cannot be denied, it is because of this clash that we must examine the use of English (or other imperial languages) as the vehicular language in post-colonial narratives. Finally, although they are not post-colonial scholars themselves, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s works, specifically their book Kafka: Towards a Minor Literature (1975) can provide us with another analytical framework if we consider Vuong’s novel part of a “minor literature” according to their criteria. For Deleuze and Guattari, a minor literature must reunite the following conditions: The three characteristics of minor literature are the deterritorialization of language, the connection of the individual to a political immediacy, and the collective assemblage of enunciation. We might as well say that minor no longer designates specific literatures but the revolutionary conditions for every literature within the heart of what is called great (or established) literature. (18) Vuong novel, as I will demonstrate in the analysis of the novel, meets every criterion for the novel to be acknowledged as a literary work belonging to a minor literature. However, although I believe that the three characteristics are pivotal for this analysis, I am particularly interested in the question of language, the deterritorialization and consequent reterritorialization of an imposed language resonates with many post-colonial stances towards language (Ashcroft et al. 1989), so the addition of Deleuze and Guattari’s perspective on language to the previously mentioned post-colonial scholars’ theories assembles perfectly in this analytical framework. Vuong’s adoption of a minor literature opens for him a way of relating to a world of which he is both part of and alien to and his text becomes a way of mediating his minority group within a major language and a major society. The text under analysis in this dissertation is not only a work of fiction, but a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. It is an —at first glance, futile— attempt by a son to communicate with her mother, but it is not only that. He aims to tell her story to the world, to keep her memory alive, and to do reparative justice. 3. Analysis of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous Vuong’s novel commences with the words “Dear Ma // I am writing to reach you— even if each word I put down is a word further from where you are.” (3) From the very beginning the relationship of Little Dog, the narrator, and Rose, his mother, is simply impossible. There is an immeasurable distance between them because she cannot read what he 15 This collective enunciation through the individual narrator is eminently political because in minor literature “its cramped space forces each individual intrigue to connect immediately to politics.” (Deleuze and Guattari 17) The story of his family is the story of every Vietnamese refugee and the struggles they must overcome to survive in America. When Little Dog describes the nail salon in communal terms, he says: “where our children are raised” and “where, in the back rooms, our women squat on the floor over huge woks that pop and sizzle over electric burners.” (Vuong 79, emphasis mine) The workplace invades the domestic and destroys the boundary between the two spaces, which transports the colonial-capitalist dynamics of the workplace to the realm of the house. This impossibility to escape politics even in the most private locus of the family makes every experience lived in Little Dog’s family political, and by the sole act of writing about it, it is a resistance to the imposed narratives the Empire forces on them: “The literary machine thus becomes the relay for a revolutionary machine-to-come.” (Deleuze and Guattari 18) Little Dog, nonetheless, is aware of how the sole act of writing in English reproduces that same violence he is trying to overcome. In relation to the idea that language is purely ideological, D’Urso refers to Louis Althusser Ideological State apparatuses and conceives syntax as: [A] set of rules, principles, and processes that govern the structure of sentences within a language—and is reinforced by state authority through educational, legislative, and political apparatuses—then syntax may be considered an ideology: an imagined set of narratives which connects individuals to their real conditions of existence and simultaneously subjects individuals to a higher authority. (1) Therefore, English reinforces a certain set of ideas that materialize in discourse, such as violence, which Little Dog is desperate to escape from: You killed that poem, we say. You’re a killer. You came in to that novel guns blazing. I am hammering this paragraph, I am banging them out, we say. I owned that workshop. I shut it down. I crushed them. We smashed the competition. I’m wrestling with the muse. The state, where people live, is a battleground state. The audience a target audience. “Good for you, man,” a man once said to me at a party, “you’re making a killing with poetry. You’re knockin’ ’em dead.” (Vuong 179) But even though he collects all of these aggressive metaphors, he knows how much power they hold because, as Milan Kundera writes, “metaphors are dangerous. Metaphors are not to be 16 trifled with. A single metaphor can give birth to love.” (17, my translation) Therefore, if English allows this creative potential “why can’t the language for creativity be the language of regeneration?” (Vuong 179) The instrumentalization of the English language allows Vuong to critically engage with the experiences of his family and to create a narrative in which “to impose on apparently chaotic episodes a perceived sequence, whether or not that sequence was perceived in an identical way during the period that is being rescued from oblivion by memory and language.” (Langer 41) The testimonies he rescues from her mother and her grandmother are inscribed into a narrative to try to make sense of them. By being narrativized, the irrational and ungraspable nature of the traumatic event can finally be addressed; Little Dog is not telling “a story so much as a shipwreck—the pieces floating, finally legible.” (Vuong 190) This critical engagement, which is crucial for the process of narrativization of traumatic events, emerges from the distance that exists between the narrator and the English language, it allows him to narrate emotionally charged experiences with a certain remoteness. This distance does not interfere with the narration, on the contrary, I argue that his writing enjoys a critical perspective that perfectly assembles with the dramatic experiences of the war, and that his broken syntax and experimental style reflects the novel’s depiction of moral, psychological, sexual and cultural disjunctions. 3.3. The rhetoric of healing Little Dog often uses animal metaphors to symbolize his experiences and those of his family, furthermore, he explicitly addresses this resource at the end of the novel: “What we would give to have the ruined lives of animals tell a human story—when our lives are in themselves the story of animals.” (242) He writes about several animals, but for the purpose of my analysis I will focus on the monarchs and the buffaloes as I believe they are the most fruitful to understand my argument. Little Dog’s letters are plagued with references to the migrations of the monarchs, which clearly references their own migration from Vietnam: “The monarchs that fly south will not make it back north. Each departure, then, is final. Only their children return; only the future revisits the past.” (8) This revisitation is both physical, when Little Dog goes to Vietnam to bury Lan, and symbolical, in the form of the postmemories he inherited from Lan and Rose which “can become a practice of repair and transformation. It reminds of multiple pasts while facing potential futures.” (Hirsch 175) In addition, these metaphors co-exist with explicit memories of the war: 17 Sometimes, I imagine the monarchs fleeing not winter but the napalm clouds of your childhood in Vietnam. I imagine them flying from the blazed blasts unscathed, their tiny black-and-red wings jittering like debris that kept blowing, for thousands of miles across the sky, so that, looking up, you can no longer fathom the explosion they came from, only a family of butterflies floating in clean, cool air, their wings finally, after so many conflagrations, fireproof. (14) In every instance where these metaphors appear, there is a conscious strive towards beauty, for Vuong, beauty is a mean to heal trauma and to understand it, and through the healing of his own trauma he aims to affect his own family and help them through the process. This unbreakable connection is emphasized in another animal metaphor, buffaloes: One afternoon, while watching TV with Lan, we saw a herd of buffalo run, single file, off a cliff, a whole steaming row of them thundering off the mountain in Technicolor. “Why they die themselves like that?” she asked, mouth open. Like usual, I made something up on the spot: “They don’t mean to, Grandma. They’re just following their family. That’s all. They don’t know it’s a cliff. (179) Little Dog is following the same path that his family has followed, one of traumatic violence that ends in despair and pain. Monarchs symbolize the healing from trauma and buffaloes the seemingly unavoidable destiny that the scar of the war has posed on him through his family’s story. It is at the end of the novel where these two animals interlock in a cathartic resolution that brings the novel’s protagonist to a complete understanding of what Rose, Lan and he have gone through: I think of the buffaloes somewhere, maybe in North Dakota or Montana, their shoulders rippling in slow motion as they race for the cliff, their brown bodies bottlenecked at the narrow precipice … And just as the first one steps off the cliff, onto air, the forever nothing below, they ignite into the ochre-red sparks of monarchs. Thousands of monarchs pour over the edge, fan into the white air, like a bloodjet hitting water. I race through the field as if my cliff was never written into this story, as if I was no heavier than the words in my name. (241) He finally comes to terms with the violence he has experienced all of his life through the use of beauty. Narration, thus, is not enough, but beauty is a key factor for Vuong when he tries to comprehend his heritage and how it has affected him. 18 Memories are presented throughout the whole book, but it is in the final part of the novel where they acquire this healing property. Little Dog actively strives towards remembering, it is a conscious activity because “memory is a choice,” (75) as it becomes clear through the use of the anaphoric structure “I remember” which is placed at the beginning of many paragraphs at the end of the novel and also at the beginnings of sentences. Memory, then, is “a second chance” (Vuong 159) and “a space for alternative potential stories,” (Hirsch 175) and that space becomes a dimension where “the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew.” (Bhabha 208) I believe that Bhabha’s Third Space is crucial for understanding the process of bringing back memories, as for Bhabha, this locus has the same emancipatory value that Hirsch ascribes to postmemory. Bhabha states that this space is a “political and historical site of enunciation [that] transforms the meanings of the colonial inheritance into the liberatory signs of a free people of the future.” (209) Hence, these beautifully written reports of the war serve two purposes: to give voice to what colonialism did to his community and his family and to try to comprehend and heal the damage colonialism has done through narration. Little Dog, finally, arrives to a reconciling conclusion: Yes, there was a war. Yes, we came from its epicenter. In that war, a woman gifted herself a new name—Lan—in that naming claimed herself beautiful, then made that beauty into something worth keeping. From that, a daughter was born, and from that daughter, a son. All this time I told myself we were born from war—but I was wrong, Ma. We were born from beauty. Let no one mistake us for the fruit of violence—but that violence, having passed through the fruit, failed to spoil it. (Vuong 231) Beauty, therefore, plays a key role in Vuong’s style, his prose being filled with beautiful metaphors and imagery. It is undeniably that Vuong is careful in structuring sentences and choosing words —perhaps, a style he owes to his first works which were mainly poems, but this feature might not be only interpreted as a formal issue. By infusing English with this poetically beautiful style, he aims to reterritorialize the language, dispossessed it from the imperial values it holds and make it suitable for his decolonial needs (Deleuze and Guattari 16). Deleuze and Guattari, on the matter of reappropriating language —or, using their terminology, reterritorialize— ask themselves: 19 How many people today live in a language that is not their own? Or no longer, or not yet, even know their own and know poorly the major language that they are forced to serve? This is the problem of immigrants, and especially of their children, the problem of minorities, the problem of a minor literature, but also a problem for all of us: how to tear a minor literature away from its own language, allowing it to challenge the language and making it follow a sober revolutionary path? (19) In Vuong’s prose, beauty is the primordial mean through which a reterritorialization of language is accomplished. And being the method through which language acquires a suitable value for its means, beauty becomes a political weapon which with to contest imperial narratives and their position of subalternity. Hence, beauty serves two purposes in his style: resilience and resistance. Healing colonial trauma and resisting the imperial offensives are two struggles that must not be understood on their own, because, though both derive from the same root and exist in the post-colonial context, they are two different effects of the same problem. Although for Deleuze and Guattari the practice of deterritorialization “proceeds by dryness and sobriety, a willed poverty;” (19) and deem any attempt to enrich language as “artificial” and “desperate.” (19) I argue that in Vuong’s novel this poetic style cannot be, in any case, considered coward or escapist. The very fact that Little Dog is revisiting the testimonies of a war that has scarred his community for life and dares to write about it in such an elaborate prose, even taking into account the choice of writing in English when he is aware of the violence that it exerts on his community, is proof enough of a brave confrontation with his colonial past. The deterritorialization and posterior reterritorialization of language occurs through beauty, as Vuong himself says: I try not to write out of anger, I try not to build my arch with rage … I’m interested in when you’re done with anger, when your anger was concealed and redirected or allowed to defuse without manifestation. That is such an interesting thing to me. Not suppress it or to be ashamed of it but to feel it and allow it to do nothing on you to let it enter and leave like the poison it is. (Fragoso 44:14-44:55) Vuong’s fixation with beauty is obviously connected to his idea of hope, and how Vuong is hopeful for the future, which is reflected in the final metaphor of the monarchs and the realization that the trauma caused by war, although it still haunts him, can also be overcome. In the final pages of the novel, Little Dog recalls an episode where they went to grab food in a 20 church and found blood in the pavement, his mother tries to calm him down and makes him focus on the birds in a tree: I remember Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hands wet over mine. Red. Red. Red. Red. Your hand so hot. Your hand my own. I remember you saying, “Little Dog, look up. Look up. See? Do you see the birds in the trees?” I remember it was February. The trees were black and bare against an overcast sky. But you kept talking: “Look! The birds. So many colors. Blue birds. Red birds. Magenta birds. Glittered birds.” … I remember how your eyes widened. I remember staring and staring at the end of your finger until, at last, an emerald blur ripened into realness. And I saw them. The birds. All of them. How they flourished like fruit as your mouth opened and closed and the words wouldn’t stop coloring the trees. I remember forgetting the blood. I remember never looking down. (230-231) At the beginning of the excerpt, colour is presented as a sign of violence only to become a sign of beauty at the end of the fragment. It is through the art of metaphor that, as Bhabha says, “the same signs can be appropriated, translated, rehistoricized, and read anew.” (208) Metaphor and beauty, therefore, bring Little Dog to a cathartic ending at the end of the novel, where he finally understands and overcome the trauma that his family has carried for generations, and in healing from his trauma, he also liberates his family from the same burden. The exploration of beauty as a method for resilience in Vuong’s novel contradicts a much-cited passage of Cultural Criticism and Society (1949), an essay written by the German philosopher Theodor Adorno in which he states that “[t]o write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today.” (281) This impossibility points out the crisis that emerges when trying to represent the traumatic event, the attempt to narrativize trauma generally means a banalization or reduction of the trauma itself, as its nature is so incommensurable that it is simply not possible to grasp it entirely. But then, if trauma is purely unspeakable, is resigning to this fact the only answer? Is there no solution to this problem? Vuong does not sentence a final and perfect solution, but a path that points towards new healing scenarios. Beauty, then, could be an optimistic journey to reparation, instead of resigning to what trauma has done on his community, he is reluctant to be quiet and does what he is capable of to come to terms with the legacy of this colonial past. Therefore, it is not an erasure, I argue it is an overcoming both of the traumatic event and of the 21 colonial legacy, through the creation of a new narrative written in a new language where he has been able to escape the conditions that constricted him in the first place. 4. Conclusions Throughout this dissertation, the way language is employed and portrayed in Ocean Vuong’s semi-autobiographical novel, and the processes that shape this particular relationship with language have been put under a thorough analysis, because I consider it instrumental to comprehend both trauma and healing. Furthermore, I have argued that the method in which many post-colonial scholars (Brathwaite 1984; Fanon 1986; wa Thiong’o 1987) have approached the problem of language in their colonised nations greatly serve to explain Little Dog´s struggles with language. Although these theories are mostly focused on particular contexts where imperial nations impose a language on the population of the colonized territory —such as the United Kingdom on Kenya or Nigeria—, they have proven exceedingly successful in the analysis of immigrant’s backgrounds such as the one described in the novel, as these kind of migrations are forced upon the populations of the Global South affected by the prevailing colonial dynamics forged in the past centuries and currently reinforced by Western countries. Additionally, by acknowledging trauma as product of a war that begun due to imperial motivations, it becomes clear how it is imperative to address how trauma particularly affects marginalised populations and how post-colonial theory questions and tries to correct the Western biases that trauma scholarship tends to have. Thanks to this crossed perspective of trauma studies and post-colonial studies, I believe that Vuong’s aim with this novel has become clear. For him, the use of the English language, a symbol of the forced migration and violence his community has endured, in the narration of this trauma has proven to be a key tool for its resolution. This paradoxical use of English as a symbol of violence and resilience mirrors the mode in which trauma is usually resolved: the revisitation and consequent confrontation of the traumatic event to narrativize it in the hopes of grasping a better understanding of it. Moreover, the way in which the protagonist’s mother and his own testimonies mix with those belonging to other immigrants also hints to the mode in which colonial dynamics affect not only his family, but his community and even other immigrants’ communities who are 22 othered by their language, class and race. Vuong attempts to preserve their memories and give voice to the testimonies of these subalterns who have been stripped from discourse. Hence, Vuong’s novel challenges the mainstream narratives that the American media has created surrounding the Vietnam War, which mostly focus on the PTSD many American soldiers experienced after the war, thus neglecting other traumatic experiences of subaltern, non-Western and racialized subjects. Furthermore, he makes us conscious of how the colonial dynamics that detonated the war in the first place are still perceived even in the inescapable realm of language. The notion of minor literature enunciated by Deleuze and Guattari has also been useful for my analysis, as a I believe that their theory, specifically the concepts of deterritorialization and reterritorialization of language, provide an analytical framework to understand how the subversion of the English language is achieved. Even more, their theory also connects Vuong’s work with a political struggle for liberation and to his aim to become a voice for the situation of the Vietnamese immigrant community. Additionally, it should be noted that for Vuong, the crucial concept to accomplish his task is beauty, which serves as the mean through which Vuong masterfully orchestrates subversion. For Vuong, beauty is both the door to a more hopeful feature and to a rewriting of a traumatic past. It serves as a method to revisit the past, understand it and overcome it, but rather than relying on oblivion, the healing occurs through a re-narrativization of the events that have brought the colonial subject to his current state, which after coming to accept his position, allows him to own and write his future. Beauty, therefore, emphasizes the idea of change, the hopeful thought that his family and everyone that comes after them will enjoy a better life. It subverts the expectations and archetypes of the renegade colonial subject and challenges the narratives imposed on them by imagining a new optimistic future, one that is not prescribed by their traumatic past but that also recognises it as a key factor of their situation. Allow me, finally, to return to a question I posed earlier in this dissertation: why writing a letter to a mother who cannot read? Little Dog is hopeful that just as the memory of the war was engraved within him, his idea of beauty will eventually reach his mother through the knowledge of their culture, in which reincarnation plays a key role: Ma, I don’t know if you’ve made it this far in this letter—or if you’ve made it here at all. You always tell me it’s too late for you to read, with your poor liver, your exhausted bones, that after everything you’ve been through, you’d just like to rest now. That 23 reading is a privilege you made possible for me with what you lost. I know you believe in reincarnation. I don’t know if I do but I hope it’s real. Because then maybe you’ll come back here next time around. Maybe you’ll be a girl and maybe your name will be Rose again, and you’ll have a room full of books with parents who will read you bedtime stories in a country not touched by war. Maybe then, in that life and in this future, you’ll find this book and you’ll know what happened to us. And you’ll remember me. 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